Negotiating Gender in Snorri’s Edda: A Reading of the Skaði Episodes

Snorri’s Sturluson’s thirteenth-century prose Edda contains two stories featuring a giant’s daughter named Skaði and her dealings with the divine Æsir.¹ Although both episodes are relatively minor in the scheme of the Edda, each depicts Skaði and the Æsir negotiating Skaði’s gender—specifically, they debate whether she is her father’s “son” who can take up the active pursuits of vengeance and hunting. Skaði’s journey within the prose Edda is intriguing and unique because she not only plays the traditionally masculine role of avenger in the absence of any surviving male relatives, as Carol Clover and Margaret Clunies Ross have noted,² she also eventually separates from her divine husband to return to her father’s stronghold, which she appears to manage on her own. Even though other medieval Icelandic accounts link her to Óðinn as his concubine, in the prose Edda she manages to regain masculine status and power despite the Æsir’s attempts to restore her to a female role through her marriage. Thus, Skaði offers a glimpse of the potential for mobility within medieval Icelandic gender norms, demonstrating how they operate as a series of ongoing negotiation.

Skaði’s dealings with the Æsir are split across two books of Snorri’s Edda, Gylfaginning (the tricking of Gylfi) and Skáldskaparmál (the language of poetry). Although these brief tales do not appear together, Skaði’s challenging of the Æsir in Skáldskaparmál clearly sets up her marital conflict in Gylfaginning. Therefore, it may be helpful to begin this reexamination of these myths with a short summary that reunites these stories of Skaði and presents them in chronological order. In Skáldskaparmál, Skaði Þjazadóttir travels to Ásgarðr, home of the Æsir, in order to exact vengeance for Þórr’s killing of her father Þjazi (Skáldskaparmál, p. 2). Snorri writes that she “tók hjálm ok brynju ok ǫll hervápn” (Skáldskaparmál, p. 2) (took helmet and mail-coat and all weapons of war [Edda, p. 61]), and made her way to the stronghold, showing that she prepares herself for an armed conflict with the Æsir. This response to the death of a near kinsperson would be honorable in Snorri’s Iceland, where the social expectation of repaying another person for slights against one’s honor had extreme pull.³ However, Skaði’s case is unusual in that the role of avenger hardly ever falls to a woman.⁴ Rather than potentially entering into a feud with their old adversary’s daughter,⁵ the Æsir swiftly offer a series of unusual compensations for the death of Skaði’s father: first, they give her a choice of husband af Ásum (Skáldskaparmál, p. 2) (from among the Æsir [Edda, p. 61]), then the trickster Loki makes her laugh—something she had thought impossible given her grief—by attaching a rope to his testicles in order to play tug-of-war with a nanny goat, and finally Óðinn places her father Þjazi’s eyes in the sky as a constellation (Skáldskaparmál, p. 2).

Unfortunately, one of these boons leads to unhappiness in the other Skaði episode, which takes place after her marriage. In Ásgarðr, Skaði is allowed to choose one of the Æsir for her husband, but she may only select him by his feet (Skáldskaparmál, p. 2).⁶ Thinking to win the gloriously beautiful Baldr for her husband, Skaði picks what she believes to be the most attractive feet, only to discover that they belong to the sea-god Njǫrðr. Njǫrðr is actually a member of a different, and possibly less prestigious,⁷ pantheon called the Vanir, who has been fully adopted by the Æsir after being fostered among them (Gylfaginning, p. 23). He dutifully marries Skaði, but the two have difficulty deciding where to live. Skaði wants to return to her father’s hall in the mountains, while Nj...